Case Study: How One Simple Change Tripled&nbspConversions

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I'm the SEO at Click Optimize, a web design and internet marketing company based in Raleigh, NC. I may not do as much as my co-workers on the client side of things, but even I know that when it comes to clients, they're almost always results-oriented. Of course, it makes sense... why would you pay for something that doesn't have tangible results? If "content is king," then results are the divine being that grant the king sovereignty over his kingdom. Without the blessing of results, the king reigns supreme over a whole lotta nothing.

That said, I'd like to present a case study of how at least one super-simple change tripled sales leads (results!) for one of our clients.

Traffic in March, 2010

In March of 2010, not long after we took control of the site, it was pulling around 3,200 unique visitors per month. Not too shabby. For goals, they were tracking leads in the form of completed "Contact Us" forms. The form was located on their site on the "Contact Us" page. Straightforward enough. Tons of sites do it this way. Those 3,807 visits led to 56 goal completions. So, they were converting at 1.7% on their own, using the one contact form. Like I said, plenty of sites do things this way, and there's nothing explicitly wrong with it. But after the time I spent doing SEM, I remember that a good practice to follow is to have your landing page be as few clicks from a conversion as possible. A "Contact Us" page is pretty necessary, but it often doesn't make for the most appropriate landing page. So what did we change?

Enter the Short-form Contact Box

If the conversion you're looking for is a completed contact form, it's pretty simple to make every page a landing page by adding something like this to a sidebar. A "Contact Us" page is still certainly necessary, as it contains detailed info (hours, address, email, etc), but for speed-obsessed customers, the short form and ever-present contact box is hard to beat. This allows you to direct traffic to the most relevant page while still never being more than 1 click from a conversion! In the event your business needs more info than a short form box will allow, you can always gather their contact info and follow up later on the phone, or via email.

Seems simple, right? I'm shocked at how few businesses actually employ this tactic. It's such an easy way to add another contact touchpoint with potential buyers. Let's see how it affected the company in question for our case study...

Goal completions after adding the box

Fast forward to March, 2012. Let's have a look at goal completion with that box on every page.

175 goal completions. That's over three times as many. And I know what you're thinking... there was more traffic, right? Nope! (Well, at least not significantly more)

More importantly than raw conversions was the fact that adding this box tripled the conversion rate, up to 5.1%. Talk about increasing bang for your buck!

Another interesting item of note is pages per visit. They actually dropped (along with time on site) from 7.70 to 4.92. However, bounce rate was almost identical. So what can we infer from this? To me, it's pretty clear that the website design is more user-friendly, which is really what this is all about. Making a few key changes allowed users to find what they were looking for faster and more efficiently. So, the client benefits from higher ROI, users have better access to the info they're looking for, and we get to keep a good client. Win-win-win!

Closing

I'm not claiming to be breaking any ground here... the tactic outlined has been done before. I'm just trying to show (with numbers) how attention to some of the simpler things can really benefit your website in a measurable way. Perhaps stuff like this is obvious to many of you. That's great. However, considering how many sites out there forgo simple improvements like this, it couldn't hurt to share! Go add those forms to your site! And hey, if you don't want to do it yourself, feel free to contact us!

Any of you folks have similarly simple changes that can really help? I'd love to hear about them in the comments!

Collin, nothing better than making a small change and seeing a fantastic return, so congratulations.

I'd be curious though, as I've done this myself too, were the quality of the leads as good as the quality of the leads before the change? The reason I ask is that I've done this on many websites and the quality of the leads has been less and people often just fill out a form as they're lazy. Just curious.

Definitely a solid point. I'd have to check with our client to determine that for sure, but one thing I can say is that they're still our client, so they must be happy with the results!

Also, while this tactic may produce some more low-quality leads, I don't see it having any effect on the leads you were going to generate anyways. That is to say, someone who would've been a lead before isn't likely to now be a worse lead because of where the contact box was. So you're not going down in any measurable way. Maybe the additional leads are lower quality, but if some of them lead to sales you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, then hey... improvement is improvement.

Christopher, thank you for bringing up the topic of the final conversion rate (i.e. the one that matters for time spent vs money made).

On one of my client's site we had to revert back to a contact form with bigger "hurdle" for clients. Making it too easy to send inquiry from the website increased the amount of leads (of course) but because of the lower quality of leads the sales team spent much more time for the same number of sales (i.e. the final conversion rate % dropped). ...and we all know time is money. ;)

Collin, it would be interesting to know what happened in the case of your client.

I always feel that every site is entirely subjective to what type of business it is to make answering questions worthwhile. I guess it comes down to pricing. How much is your or your clients time worth vs how much is each sale worth.

If your products are $ - $$ try to get folks on a new product mailing list. & take all comments/questions and implement the answers into your website so people don't have to ask the simple questions in the first place.

If your products/services are $$ - $$$ spend the time answering the questions. Again I reiterate: implement the top questions into your product/service info. Then you know that the questioners are seriously looking at converting into buyers.

If your products/services are $$$$+ answer the questions via a immediate chat box and try to get them to talk to an "senior tech" on the phone to try & close the sale. Again, you need to implement the top questions into your products/service info.

However, once you get into the $$$$+ range your buyers are impatient. I have found that if my site owners with high $ services/products respond to a contact form request within 3-6hrs they usually get the sale because the person is impressed with responsiveness which makes the purchase feel "safe".

Great article Collin. Straight to the point with good data to illustrate your points.

I wonder if the leads were of the same high quality? I.e. were customers that previously went to the effort to find the contact page and fill out the necessary info more like to 'end convert' (i.e produce meaningful sales/conversions, not just supply contact info)?

Were customers that filled in info in the short-form contact box less inclined to follow up if the company contacted them? Just curious.

K.I.S.S. - don't make them think & make it easy to get an answer & depending on the type of business create a dialog.

I would suggest for eCommerce sites that a simple ask a quick question chat box would be just as effective.

Though, I would sincerely recommend that sites keep a log of their questions and take the top ones and implement them into a faq page or answer the questions people have about their products/services on each product/services page.

I have seen situations where designers were changing color pictures of people from white & black to Color back and forth from month to month to measure conversions. It was pretty funny, but in the end they went with Black & White bcz the color distracted the user from signing up. Odd stuff but it was true. Was with a dating website landing page btw.

We just launched a new site. I am going to do some A/B testing and try putting the form right on our home page... Thx! I also read in an article yesterday that having 4 or less fields on a form highly increases the chance of submission...

Nice to see some results of how the implementation of a functionality can impact the use of it. Though in my opinion it's just a matter of prioritization on the webmaster side. Is contacting the webmaster an important functionality, then it should get the attention as described in this article. However, if contacting the webmaster is not that important, I wouldn't want to waste any space to it.

This case study looked at the contact form, but I think the results can easily be generalizable to for example the FAQ, registration or the Community Blog functionalities.

Hi,you have said the right thing, actually we always use a small Request a Quote or Contact Us form on the right or left panel or some times it goes after the body content end. Thanks for sharing your findings with us.

Very cool! I'm actually creating a site for a client right now where there is massive "request a quote" contact form right in the middle of the front page. I think it looks good and really encourages engagement!

I agree that user experience is one of the best things to have for the user, especially if your selling something that you can buy quickly, or that you need to contact for an appointment (e.g. landscaping services, phone service etc.)

However, for those companies that rely on customer interaction with the products before they can purchase it (mainly e-commerce). Moving the contact box up in the order flow would be great for most e-commerce sites, but they have to make sure the customer can interact with the product before asking them to "sign up" or "order".

You're right about it depending on the specific product or industry you're dealing with. I'm sure there are similar tactics for e-commerce, something along the lines of a "buy now" button.

You know, this may be an anecdotal tangent, but it's related to increasing Conversion Rate... I can't count how many times I've seen something on a site and decided to buy it, but then abandoned the purchase because they want me to "sign up" with them. E-commerce sites are shooting themselves in the foot if they don't offer a "guest-checkout," or "fast-checkout" option.

Unless you have something to offer your customers (loyalty cards/reward points, first dibs on discounts etc) but even then it's best to wait till after the transaction (via guest checkout) to ask if the customer wants to sign up, with the details already provideded via the guest checkout option!

Thanks for the case study. It's always nice to have real numbers behind strategic changes, especially when it comes to CRO. I've also spotted the odd contact form inside a Wordpress lightbox popup box in place of a newsletter signup. Did you place your contact form above the fold?

Making it simple for your customers to contact you is something that will help any website. On our ecommerce site we find more customers use our live chat when it is available versus filling out our contact form. We get more people filling out the contact form when our live chat is not available (weekends & night time).

Interesting stuff Collin, I am sure many people have done
this before but case study to prove your point is always a great idea!

I have played this few years back when we were strictly targeting
small business what are new to business and want a business growth though
online channels.

This is over all a great idea but one thing that might
irritates to many clients is the SPAM that has been gifted with the increase in
conversions… don’t you think adding a captche in the short form can help reduce
the SPAM which is quite natural in almost every industry!

Great post and congrats. One thing that I would suggest is condensing that form even further, combine the name fields and make only phone or email a required. Keeping your forms as minimal as possible will increase conversions even further.

Another thing that you can try is making it sound like the lead is getting something valuable for leaving their details, you could try something like 'Free business analysis - a one page document uncovering your full potential' etc

With lead gen quantity is preferable to quality - let the companies sales people pull out the weeds during a follow up convo

Collin, this is great information and a little surprised (good surprised) on the increase in conversions. This just shows you that UX design is extremely important. Basically we are adding a call to action "Contact Form" to every page.